'Must Try Harder'

I decided when I began this blog that I wasn’t going to ‘waffle’ when I didn’t have anything to say. I can’t really believe I have had nothing to say since April, which only leaves the excuse of laziness – can that be an excuse? My ‘school report’ will now read ‘must try harder’.

Well I have read 35 books since my last entry, among those that impressed me most were John Henry Newman’s ‘The Idea of the University’, a book I came to via Helene Hanff’s ’84 Charing Cross Road’ – she loved the first edition that Marks and Co were able to procure for her. I can understand her delight. The edition I read was not a first, but was still from 1879 (a London Library loan) and as well as the content, the heft, page quality and smell of ‘old book’ were part of the pleasure of its reading. If I could recommend one book to our new coalition leaders and education ministers to read it would be this one. The import of knowledge for its own sake seems to be a resource and desire long lost and undervalued, and Newman makes a fine case for its consideration. This book is as relevant now as it was at its time of writing. I had to buy my own copy in the end, I can’t bear not to own books I love. My paperback isn’t as seductive to hold though as the 1879 edition!

Ahead of going to see the exhibition ‘The Wyeth Family’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery I bumped into a biography of Andrew Wyeth on the Library shelves – the artist in that family whose work I have long admired. Richard Meryman’s ‘Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life’ was insightful and fascinating.

“Oil is hot and fiery, almost like a summer night, where tempera is a cool breeze, dry, crackling like winter branches blowing in the wind. I’m a dry person, really. I’m not a juicy painter. There’s no fight in oil. It doesn’t have the austere in it. The difference is like the difference between Beethoven and Bach.”

Andrew Wyeth in Meryman, R, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life, HarperCollins, 1997, p 118

If the exhibition was a little disappointing in that it was made up of works from a single collection, and in my view, didn’t span the breadth of Andrew Wyeth’s work, I did purchase a couple of beautiful books of his paintings.

At first sight, Allison Pearson’s ‘I think I love you’ appeared likely to be a more ‘fluffy’ novel than the kind of novel I might normally pick up, but as a one-time David Cassidy fan (aged 11-13 – why is it necessary to qualify!) I couldn’t resist. She has certainly captured that high-octane obsession young girls were capable of, certainly in the 1960s/1970s, who are trying out their new emotions on safe, feminised, unattainable famous young men. And there was much to amuse in this (autobiographical?) novel of two young welsh girls to women and their passion. But more seriously Allison Pearson captured some of the ages of youth to young adulthood experienced by teen girls. And also the less positive side of the life of fame for a young man, still evolving, who is riding a wave of success, but whose identity was both being consumed, defined and distorted by the media, and whose own natural ‘growing’ arc was being warped by the experience he was undergoing. In the end I felt hugely sorry for Cassidy (perhaps lock up your son’s mother!). The book concludes with an interview Pearson did with David Cassidy in the 1990s, where you can sense a duality of acceptance – whilst wishing to acknowledge the privilege of bearing such an important role in the lives of young girls and women at a very formative age, there is a core of resentment towards the strains and abuses sustained by himself.

Since reading Shirley Hazzard’s memoir on Graham Greene and her most admired novel ‘The Transit of Venus’ I have acquired the rest of her novels and enjoyed the tone and constrained style of both ‘The Evening of the Holiday’ and ‘The Bay at Noon’. I am looking forward to the remaining three volumes on the pile over the Summer holiday.

Also among the Summer reading pile will be: Carol Sklenicka’s biography of Raymond Carver, and a re-reading of some of his short stories, comparing them with the volume ‘Beginnings’ which are the stories before they were edited by Gordon Lish. Two volumes awaiting the pressing of ‘send’ in my Amazon basket: Fergal Keane’s ‘Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 - The Epic Story of the Last Great Stand of Empire’ and Jonathan Raban’s ‘Driving Home – an American Scrapbook’, both writers whose work I greatly admire. Stella Duffy’s novel ‘Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore’, the first of her novels I will have read, and possibly a trip to India with Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’ ... but then again...